I have this grand idea that’s been brewing (haha, see what I did there) in the back of my mind for a long while now, and that is to create a coffee table book centered around local small business coffee culture. I want this book to feature several local small businesses, with photographs that highlight important things to their company, as well as a written piece that tells the story of each business. I want it to be something that not only showcases coffee, but connects people around it.
To inspire myself to pursue this idea, and to grow in my skills and coffee photography abilities I did a recent product shoot of coffee bean retail bags for a local small business. Here’s what I learned in the process:
- Not everything goes as you plan… Obviously this is true for anything, but in the case of this shoot I had done some scouting and thought I knew exactly where and how I wanted to run this shoot. However, after setting everything up, running through all the product bags, and then beginning to tear things down, I found a different spot with lighting that I thought looked so much better. This made it take SO MUCH TIME.
2. Angles are important, even when you’re tired and just want to finish… Unfortunately I did not recognize this until a couple days later when I went to edit these photos, but I did not give enough angle to the bag and the final photos looked so flat. There was no dimension, and the coffee bag looked like it could’ve been a sticker added to a random blurry background- not my finest work.
3. The background… Even if it’s for a product, your background matters! Along similar lines as my last point, when looking at my final image the background was too close and blurry, there was too much going on and the way it was blurred was distracting. This also was a factor in my photos having very little dimension and turning out to be very flat.
Okay, with all that in mind, I think I have learned my lessons for next time. I will also be going back and re-taking these because I can do better!
orange sky snapshots 